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Communication. If you or your organisation feel misunderstood? it may be worth thinking again about the process of communication! |
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If you think conceptually about communication, all messages go through the
same process, one way, two way, commercially paid for, editorial, face to face,
websites, radio broadcasts etc etc.
The elements of a communication
Communications are made up of messages from one party to another. The
elements of a communication are always the same whether we are conscious of
this or not. The steps in the communication process outlined below can be
applied to human or machine communication, telephone systems for example work
this way, as do fax machines and email communications and when we point our
internet browsers at a website a similar process is taking place.
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Message Conception |
One party decides what
message it wants to send to the other party, e.g. "can I visit you to show you
my new products and discuss possible applications". a typical message from
salesman to possible client, the salesman may like to add that it will not take
much of the clients valuable time but could solve some of their problems for
them. The sending party may be promoting their new product on their
website, they need to conceive of what message they want to transmit. |
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Encoding |
The party knows what it wants to say, it now has
to decide how to say it so that the recipient understands what was intended.
Encoding is about phrasing or translating a message into a language the
recipient will understand which can be quite different from the senders
language.
If the relationship is human and friendly and the target
customer likes to use informal english you might encode your message "hi Tony
can I pop in I've something new that might fix your problems."
Perhaps the relationship is formal and the target customer German, your message might
be "Darf ich bitte ein halbe stunde Ihre zeit haben um unsere nue produkte
vorzustellen, wir glauben dass es Ihre anwendungs probleme losen konnnen und
ich werd es sehr gerne Ihn zeigen."
Perhaps in the english speaking
world you are having problem deciding if you should address a particular woman
as Mrs Ms or Miss or just use her christian and surname. Getting this coding
wrong might offend.
If you are trying to get a PC to talk to a Macintosh
you also have to be pretty sure that the language or protocol used is one that
the recipient machine will understand.
In the case of creating a message
on a website again translation or encoding choices may persuade you to use
images, html, flash or acrobat files and you may want to encode your website to
ensure it is compatible with various browsers, screen sizes and colour
resolutions. |
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Transmission |
As with the previous stages there are many
choices, in the case of the simple message from salesman to target customer,
there may be phone, fax, email, post, voicemail message etc etc. Where
transmission is concerned there is another concept which is NOISE.
Noise is that which would interfere with your message perhaps making it
less clear and changing its meaning. Is the translation into German good enough
for this target customer? if the message is to be passed on to the target by a
secretary and will the message change in the passing on?
For your
website message, does your server offer enough bandwidth for your message, is
the packet loss and overall filesize acceptable for your intended download
speed? |
| | | Reception |
This is how the target of your message gets it,
if it was passed on by a secretary it may differ in the telling, if a fax is
received it may be unclear, the message will be received you hope in a suitable
format and with minimum degradation for the recipient. In the case of
your website, does the recipient use the browser set up that you have
programmed for? can they display the colours of your images? can they display
the charachter set of the language? have you tested on the Macintosh computers
they use? |
| | | Decoding |
Here your target customer, the recipient of your
message, will decode the message that they have recived using their language
and their value systems. If your message was not encoded properly for
their language or if noise or interference affected its transmission they may
not be decoding the message you intended in the first place or may even not
have received it at all. You run the risk of mistakes if the targets
coding (language and values etc) are significantly different from your own, you
may easily and unintentionally offend or amuse. |
| | | Message
reception | The recipient has received and
decoded a message and now understands the message they have received. If you
worked hard or were lucky it may resemble the original message you conceived,
encoded and transmitted to them. Often this will not be the case.
Consider General Motors that named a small car Nova and then marketed it into
Spanish speaking countries. "No Va" in spanish means "does not go" hardly a
ringing endorsement for a Car! Have you ever witnessed the flame wars
that erupt in internet email conversations or chat rooms because people often
misunderstand each other having only the typed word to communicate with.
Have you visited a website that requires cookies and javascript to
navigate with a browser set up with high security and no permissions for
these? |
Summary
There are 6 steps in a one way message, communication comprises lots of
individual messages. If you are planning a communications campaign or a website
it may be a good thing to consider these before simply starting to
transmit.
The adage that perception is reality applies well to communication.
If what you intended your message to mean, differs from what the recipient
understands it to have meant, the only perception of value is what the
recipient of the message perceives it to mean.
Author: Mark Abraham mark@sticky-marketing.net 30 May 2001
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